Her best-selling debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, made her a critical darling (and a snark magnet). Now seven years the wiser, Pessl is back with a new kind of mystery.

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When I arrive a few minutes late for my lunch date with Marisha Pessl, the author of the 2006 best-selling novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, she's already seated by the window of the restaurant, serenely waiting. Here to discuss her second novel, Pessl gleams. She wears a black lace shirt by Isabel Marant, jeans, and a leather coat. Her long blond hair hangs in perfect curls. As a preternaturally telegenic personality in a field of solitary introverts, she has a reputation as something of a lit-world anomaly. Still, the level of smooth confidence that she possesses really is dazzling in person.

It's also slightly off-putting. Perhaps only because I was an ardent fan of Special Topics—a coming-of-age mystery whose 16-year-old narrator, Blue van Meer, raised by her widowed-professor father, constantly references everyone from T. S. Eliot to Homer—I'd imagined the two of us feeding off my enthusiasm for her work, batting around ideas big and small, sharing confidences about life in New York and our favorite books. Instead, Pessl is measured and professional, rarely straying from the topics at hand: her new book, Night Film, and the logistics of her creative process.

"I can't wait until I'm on my seventh novel," she enthuses at one point. Which is when I realize that her demeanor has thrown me for a loop: Is she saying this in some kind of entrepreneurial, build-the-brand kind of way, I wonder, or is she expressing the wish of a writer's writer, the woman who just a few minutes earlier listed Philip Roth among her favorite novelists? Or maybe it's literary pretension to think that a great writer shouldn't try to sell her books.

Marisha Pessl was 26 when her fairy-tale romance with the publishing world began. Born to an Austrian father and an American mother who divorced when she was three, she grew up with her mother and elder sister in Asheville, North Carolina, with frequent visits to her engineer father in Austria. Pessl's parents put a premium on intellectual and artistic pursuits; her rigorous slate of extracurriculars included French, harp, theater, and painting.

After high school, she studied film at Northwestern University for two years before transferring to Barnard College, a change inspired when she visited New York City and decided that she "needed to move here as soon as possible." She majored in comparative literature with a minor in playwriting, but writing novels was always her primary ambition. Upon graduation, Pessl took an entry-level job at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers. "I was just biding my time until I could support myself doing something I loved," she says, adding that during that short-lived detour she spent mornings, nights, sick days, and the occasional slow workday writing. At 23 she met hedge-fund manager Nic Caiano, whom she married in 2003 and whose job took the couple to London, where Pessl devoted herself full-time to finishing what would become Special Topics.

Asked if she ever feels like she missed out on the usual rites of passage for a New York writer in her twenties—roommates in Brooklyn, a community of like-minded literary people—she laughs. "No," she says. "I think I am willing to take chances, like creatively and in my personal life, so of course I don't regret anything." And then: "I actually don't know very many writers."

In 2004, Pessl cold-e-mailed 15 literary agents about her novel, including Susan Golomb, who represents Jonathan Franzen. Golomb was charmed by Pessl's note—in particular, by her blurbworthy description of her own work: "a funny, encyclopedic and wildly ambitious literary tale about love and loss, youth and yearning, treachery and terror"—and blown away by the manuscript. As I myself can attest, Blue's know-it-all, child-genius voice felt bracingly original, as did the book's extratextual gimmicks: illustrations hand-drawn by Pessl, a chapter structure modeled after a course syllabus, and an afterword presented as the novel's "Final Exam." The publishing house Viking acquired the book for $615,000, according to an industry source, the kind of money that put Pessl in an elite club of debut novelists such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Khaled Hosseini.

In addition to her writing talent, Pessl's poise and charisma were immediately apparent. "I was surprised, I think," Golomb says of first meeting the author in person. "I expected somebody a little more like Blue." As in, more of a Latin Club type with a sharp-edged bob and a sarcastic take on the world than an eager promoter of her own work. Pessl diligently prepared for interviews, studying up on the outlets beforehand. "She understood that it was her job to be good at this," says an admiring Laura Tisdel, who was then a 24-year-old publicity assistant at Viking and is now a senior editor at Little, Brown.

The Special Topics campaign was big and breathless. Viking pitched it prerelease as "Nabokovian in scope and style" and called the story "Hitchcockian and Donna Tarttish." Pessl embarked on a cross-country tour and gave media interviews big (the Associated Press) and small (BookSlut). Say your blog wanted to publish her food diary? She'd cheerfully admit to drinking nine cappuccinos a day! If your website wanted to shuffle through her iPod? She'd be happy to tell you stories about high school and "Free Bird"! This girl was game, and seemed to be enjoying it. As she put it to one interviewer, "It sounds so cliché to say that it feels like a dream, but it really does…. I wonder what on earth I did to deserve all of this." The buzz extended beyond her writing. She played French horn on a track for the hot-sisters band the Pierces' 2007 album. There was a piece in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times about her hobby of oil painting, accompanied by a photo of her in the sweeping TriBeCa loft she shared with her husband.

And the critical praise poured in: The New York Times named the novel one of the 10 best books of 2006; Time called it one of "Publishing's Next Page Turners." Critic Janet Maslin deemed it "required reading for devotees of inventive new fiction."

But with all the fun and praise also came a torrent of nastiness, much of it smacking of jealousy about the author's looks and apparent wealth. On Gawker, the evaluation of Pessl's attractiveness became a regular sport ("A post earlier today about author Marisha Pessl suggested that she might only be 'book hot,' " reads one of many blog posts on the subject. "Having seen another photo…we have upgraded Ms. Pessl's condition to 'TV hot.' "). On her personal website, book critic and reporter Sarah Weinman sneered at Pessl's success, decrying "the publishing world's almost masochistic desire to let attractive packages, so to speak, dictate their buying guidelines." The critic Meghan O'Rourke wrote a scathing takedown for Slate, concluding that "it is hard to separate what is callow about Blue from what might be callow about Pessl herself."

With all the eye rolling going on, even Pessl's defenders couldn't not acknowledge her fetching looks in their coverage of her. In the Times Book Review, Liesl Schillinger wrote that "her talent and originality would draw wolf whistles if she were an 86-year-old hunchbacked troll." An AP article began "It is, apparently, very easy to hate Marisha Pessl," beneath the headline young, talented, and rich.

After a while, Pessl says, she stopped reading about herself. "I felt totally unprepared for it," she says of the attention paid to her personal life. "When you're a neophyte, you just answer whatever question is asked of you. You're so excited to have a book out there that you don't really have your guard up."

Before she could start writing again, she had to retreat, she says, wait until she sank from the public eye. "You're going from being amateur to, like, an 'official writer,' so that has a vertiginous effect on your mental state." (The media, however, continued to cover her—a 2009 Page Six squib announced "Literary 'It' girl Marisha Pessl is single again.") In 2008, Pessl left Golomb for superagent Binky Urban, whose agency, ICM, has a strong Hollywood division. (Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy are among Urban's clients.) Then she changed publishers, moving to Random House. "I happened to meet Binky Urban socially, and it just seemed like a very nice fit, the two of us," Pessl said of the agent who reportedly secured her a $1 million deal for Night Film and a $1.5 million deal for a yet-to-be-written third novel. Recently, Night Film's movie rights were purchased.

Whether Pessl's second novel will prove as much of a success as her first remains to be seen, of course, but her publishers are betting it will be even bigger. There will be a book tour for Pessl, but leaner and less broad. Pessl will not be inviting any more reporters over to her apartment. So far, Random House's investment seems poised to pay off: Night Film's narrative is darker but just as gripping as Special Topics', and, in a fresh update to her first book's twee illustrations, fictional newspaper clippings and blog posts are sprinkled throughout. Kirkus Reviews wrote that "in her sophomore effort, Pessl hits the scary ground running," and Pessl fans on Goodreads are enthusiastic in their reception of advance copies. If Night Film isn't a book-club hit, that would be its own mystery.

In place of Blue, the book's narrator is Scott McGrath, a washed-up investigative reporter with a hard-boiled world-weariness and masculine ennui. "I was so tired of the precocious childlike narrator, like, that has been so done," says Pessl, now 35. "I was not interested in anything remotely youthful." Its middle-aged male protagonist notwithstanding, the new novel revolves around an axis similar to Special Topics': another eccentric father and prodigy daughter. This time, however, instead of being a dashing professor, the father is a solitary, possibly dangerous horror-film director. The daughter? She's dead.

It's hard not to take this as some kind of commentary on Pessl herself: The old ingenue version of the author, feeding herself to the masses in the service of selling books, is no longer. She is so reticent that the small facts I glean about her life feel like clues to be strung together in hopes of constructing a portrait: I learn that Pessl now lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side. She tells me she's equally happy in a Thai deli in Queens as at a Michelin-starred restaurant in midtown Manhattan. She divulges that she loves Alexander McQueen and Isabel Marant but also enjoys rummaging through bins at an estate sale. What she does not want to talk about: her marriage and subsequent divorce, whether she is dating, the subject of her next novel. She is vague on the details of her social life, offering only, "What's important to me is living as vibrant a life as what I write in my stories—but it's my life, and when I'm ready to write my autobiography, I'm hoping it's as colorful as what I write." Until then, she says firmly, "it belongs to me, and I like that." She has a point, and I'm suddenly disarmed all over again.